The invention is directed to a method with which a mobile unit can be controlled on a working surface locked by obstacles such that a work device attached to it covers the remaining surface as completely as possible.
Repetitive activities are being transferred more and more often to service robots. Examples of such activities are cleaning tasks, transport tasks, dispersing seed or, for example, lawn mowing. Given service robots to which surface processing devices are attached, there is the problem that this surface processing device should cover the entire space available as completely as possible, whereby optimally few paths should be traveled twice. The expense for the planning of this path should thereby also be so low that little computing capacity need be employed for this purpose, so that an accessible time behavior can be assured in the planning process. Given a cleaning robot that, for example, is intended to carry out cleaning jobs in a supermarket, the additional problem is comprised therein that, when it is utilized at the time the store is open, additional obstacles in the form of customers with grocer carts occur, and that the path traveled by the robot should be so predictable that the customers are not frightened by the cleaning robot. When the dimensions of the work and the obstacles present therein are known in terms of their position, an optimum path can be planned with the assistance of an advance traversal, traveling this path requiring little time and thereby taking as much of the surface to be covered into consideration as possible. Although path planning methods for autonomous mobile units are already known in the prior art, the topic of planning surface-covering paths has already been sporadically discussed therein: "Path Planning and Guidance Techniques For An Autonomous Mobile Cleaning Robot" by Christian Hofner and Gunther Schmidt, published in Proceedings of the Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS '94, Munich, Sep. 12-16, 1994, pages 610 through 617.